About Dick Cheney’s decline:
Some observers believe the former vice-president is showing signs of mental illness. Others bark back, “You mean you’ve only just noticed?”
Jonathan Chait slogs through the poisonous weeds of Cheneyland and takes a hard look at Cheney’s pronouncements on Iran, Obama, American decline, etc. etc.
Like all Republican officeholders and some Democratic ones, Cheney thinks Obama has struck a weak deal with Iran. Unlike most of them, Cheney suspects Obama has done so not out of naïveté but out of a cunning plan to actually encourage the Iranian nuclear program.
But what if we apply Cheney’s analytic method to his own administration’s Iran policy? After all, it was under the Bush administration that the Iranian nuclear program flourished, bringing the regime from 164 to 8,000 centrifuges. ...DailyIntel
Why do Republicans have so much trouble with facts!
What’s more, the expansion of Iran’s power under Bush was not limited to the blossoming of its nuclear program. In 2003, an extremely hostile neighboring regime (that had launched a war against it two decades before) was deposed, creating a power vacuum that Iran filled. Cheney seems to have played a role there. A Cheney-style analysis of the Bush administration’s Iran policy would conclude that it was carrying out a deliberate plan to elevate Iran’s standing.
Such a conclusion would obviously be insane. But it happens to fit the facts far more tightly than the same conclusion about Obama’s Iran policy. And this, in turn, reminds us that the most plausible real-world alternative to Obama’s Iran deal is not some “better deal.” The alternative is either war or threatening war while refusing to negotiate. …DailyIntel
The”blame Obama” campaign has no basis in reality. Reality tells us that “containing the nuclear ambitions of a determined state is extremely hard.” Time to get over our disappointment when confronted with reality.
America doesn’t have a magic wand. That stick we’ve been waving around has a little flag that pops out on one end proclaiming, “Oops, we’ve screwed up again!” Bush said he was going to put an end to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and failed. Obama, on the other hand, is facing reality.
Obama’s approach implicitly acknowledges the limits of American leverage, trading away its maximal demand to end all Iranian nuclear work completely in return for pragmatic concessions (like the elimination of advanced centrifuges, and the establishment of a vigorous inspection regime) that at least offer a chance to contain Iran’s race to the bomb. …DailyIntel
This comes as a blow to those who have profited from our crazy, failed military adventures and who like to think we have unlimited leverage. Our “top ten percent” are those Americans who have reaped the greatest rewards in the wake of “bomb, bomb,bomb!” and “Mission accomplished!”
___
Steve Coll sees Republicans in Congress who insert themselves between Obama and negotiations with other countries as dangerous and — at bottom — unconstitutional.
…Departures in American foreign policy as momentous as making peace with the Castro regime or resetting nuclear diplomacy with Iran ought not to be constructed on narrow vote margins in Congress. U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright helped to establish what was referred to during the Cold War as the One Voice Doctrine. That is, despite shifting disagreements between Presidents and Congress, the country should seek to project unity abroad, in order to reassure allies and deter enemies. The doctrine has flaws; it can be used to rationalize an imperial Presidency during national crises, among other things. Yet cohesion in foreign policy is surely preferable to senators sending freelance missives to declared enemies of the state.
The collapse of comity and common sense in Congress is not just a fountainhead of divisive politics. It is also a threat to the Constitution. The United States, founded on the hope that its three branches of government would evolve in roughly equal states of health, is not likely to manage successfully risks on the scale of China’s rise or the Middle East’s chaos if members of Congress continue to degrade and paralyze their institution. The Edward Snowden revelations provided only the latest reminder that protecting civil rights and liberty at home requires congressional oversight of the national-security state that is well resourced, expert, and unhindered by partisan opportunism. On the present evidence, it is hard to imagine Congress meeting that burden. …Coll,NewYorker